All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

This is the first time in history that a war has involved the whole world, and also it may last many years more; this thought is soul-shattering for all of us as human beings. It is horrible to think that the crimes committed by this one man Hitler have these many years been destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands and millions, and one would despair entirely were it not certain that the majority, the innumerable majority which opposes him openly or secretly, will succeed in wiping out once and for all him and his.

Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.

Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.

But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.

The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.